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About the Book

Nancy Cartwright is one of the most distinguished and influential contemporary philosophers of science. Despite the profound impact of her work, there is neither a systematic exposition of Cartwright’s philosophy of science nor a collection of articles that contains in-depth discussions of the major themes of her philosophy.

This book is devoted to a critical assessment of Cartwright’s philosophy of science and contains contributions from Cartwright's champions and critics. Broken into three parts, the book begins by addressing Cartwright's views on the practice of model building in science and the question of how models represent the world before moving on to a detailed discussion of methodologically and metaphysically challenging problems. Finally, the book addresses Cartwright's original attempts to clarify profound questions concerning the metaphysics of science.

With contributions from leading scholars, such as Ronald N. Giere and Paul Teller, this unique volume will be extremely useful to philosophers of science the world over.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1 Hoefer: Introducing Nancy Cartwright’s Philosophy of Science

Part I. Models and Representations

2 Bailer-Jones, D. Standing up Against Tradition: Models and Theories in Nancy Cartwright’s Philosophy of Science

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Gäehde, U. Nancy Cartwright on Theories, Models and Their Application to Reality: A Case Study

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Morrison, M. Models as Representational Structures

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Teller, P. The Finewright Theory

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Part II. Causes and Capacities

Giere, R. Models, Metaphysics and Methodology

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Suarez, M. Experimental Realism Defended: How Inference to the Most Likely Cause Might Be Sound

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Psillos, S. Cartwright’s Realist Toil: From Entities to Capacities

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Woodward, J. Invariance, Modularity, And All That: Cartwright on Causation

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Martel, I. The Principle of the Common Cause, The Causal Markov Condition, and Quantum Mechanics: Comments on Cartwright

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Reiss, J. Social Capacities

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Schmidt-Petri, C. Cartwright and Mill on Tendencies and Capacities

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Part III. Antifundamentalism and the Disunity of Science

Hoefer, C. For Fundamentalism

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Esfeld, M. Cartwright on Wholism

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Falkenburg, B. How Classical and Quantum States Relate: Cartwright’s Views of Quantum Theory